Friday, January 22, 2010

The Universe is winning

We have had four cellos combining to play metal music to great effect in the band Apocalyptica, and now we have eight king-size synthesizers in the band Hispanic Paradox combining to play space music to, well, not quite as great effect. This octet from San Jose plays it safe on their first CD, and selected well-known space songs to cover with their electronic beasts: the likes of David Bowie's Space Oddity, Pink Floyd's Interstellar overdrive, Elton John's Rocket man and Radiohead's Paranoid Android. The inclusion of a medley of Star Wars themes also is hardly surprising, and the only perhaps more striking choice is an amalgation of classical music themes as used in 2001 A Space Odissey, from Strauss to Ligeti. The end result is always somewhat entertaining, but honestly too much to take in one session. Pick and choose, and put 1 or 2 on the MP3 player.

The idea of this little game is to create an album cover for an imaginary artist/group, as well as an imaginary review, following these instructions:

[1] The artist/group: go to the wiki random page generator. The first random Wikipedia article obtained this way is the name of the band or performer. In this case, I ended up with Hispanic Paradox.[2] The title: go to the random quotations site. The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of the album. The random quote that came up was by Rick Cook: Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.[3] The illustration: pick a suitable one from my Flickr collection. My picture, In a galaxy far far away, can be found here on Flickr. The on-line editing was done with the programme On-line image editor, the font settings selected were Subway 60 antique white and Imperium 65 antique white, respectively.

Note: this is a variation on the "Debut album game" that has been making its rounds around bulletin boards and blogs for some time now - the original version called for a random Flickr Explore photograph to be used as the cover. I have been trying to find out who had the original idea, but so far no success.

The Blogger

About me:Dutchman, married to a beautiful and highly talented artist from Shanghai. Although my education (PhD chemistry) is very much associated with the left side of the brain, I like to use my right side for my hobbies: music, art, photography.

About this blog:I started this blog in August 2006, just wanting to share what I considered interesting pieces of visual art and music. I suffered from blogging blues for most of 2008, but making a fresh start in October of that year has done wonders for my inspiration.In case you did not notice, most posts end with a small symbol... just click that for the relevant link.All pictures in my blog are hosted on blogger - if some do not show up (the red cross syndrome) it is a blogger hiccup. Right click and selecting "show picture" should do the trick.

About the reconstruction:

End March 2017 I converted thousands of posts to draft, in order to sort out potential copyright issues. Many of these will be restored in the course of the year.

Links of interest

Reactions

Reactions: please send an email to artrock2006@gmail.com or leave a comment on FaceBook.

Copyright issues?

Most of the images used in this blog are either mine, or they are used with explicit permission of the creators, or they are in the public domain. Album cover and movie poster images are sourced on the internet and they are considered fair use for discussion at a non-profit blog.

The magnifying glass based images that occur once in a while have been put in place to show images at thumbnail size, this being considered fair use (link).

If you still find a picture on this blog that you are the copyright owner of, and object against the use, please drop me an email and I will remove it.